I just returned from a trip to Las Vegas with a friend. We stayed at Caesar’s Palace and had tickets to see Elton John at the Coliseum. This was to be the big event of our trip. The day of the performance I received an automated phone call that the show had been canceled. Bummer! What a huge disappointment.
We were able to score tickets to another show on the strip and as we settled into our seats I began to shoot the breeze with a lady sitting next to me.
Her name was Donna and she lived in New Orleans. She was in Las Vegas for a conference and told us that after Hurricane Katrina hit, her life took a wild and crazy turn for the worse.
The home she shared with her husband and three sons was destroyed when the floodwaters invaded it, rising to within two feet of the ceiling.
“We thought we might flood a bit,” she said, “but no one thought the levee would break.”
In anticipation of a possible flood, her family had packed some belongings into large plastic tubs and stored them on high bookshelves. The only tub to survived held material Donna had packed away to possibly use at a later time.
Stock certificates and important papers were soaked. Donna and her family were instructed to carefully peel them apart and set them out to dry. It was wishful thinking.
A few years before Katrina, Donna’s mother moved in with the family. She stored all her belongings in their garage. They were all destroyed.
Donna is a physician’s assistant and her husband is a firefighter. She was on the front lines of the recovery effort and stayed at her job in the hospital for two solid weeks, 24/7.
“I lost 15 pounds,” she said.
A well-known movie star made an appearance with a film crew and Donna said he was rude and uninterested in the residents of her fair city. It was all for show.
Finally as Donna and co-workers were able to leave the hospital and return home, the National Guard, which was really a bunch of kids with guns, wouldn’t let them cross a bridge into the city. One nurse, intent on reaching her home a mere two blocks away, kept moving when a kid with a gun pointed in her direction told her to “halt.”
“What are you gonna do,” she shouted over her shoulder, “shoot me?”
He said he would and she stayed put.
Donna’s family has finally received a loan to rebuild.
After the performance in Las Vegas, the artists came into the audience and grabbed folks to drag them onto the stage. Donna was the first one up there, joining a makeshift conga line and dancing. I stayed in my seat and when she returned, beaming, she said, “You should have come up there; it was a ball!”
“You go, girl,” I thought to myself.
Suddenly, the fact that Elton John had stood us up didn’t seem to matter all that much.
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